Comparative Study On The Effects Of SCMC And ACMC On Students’ Oral Performance

As a global language, English plays an increasingly important role in today’s frequentand intensive international exchanges. The problems that traditional college oral Englishteaching faces draw attention from more and more scholars and researchers. With thearrival of the information age, the advantages of network have been recognized and haveprovided new vitality for improving oral English teaching and learning. It becomes a wellworthy study to know how to use the network to promote college oral English teaching.The author tries to comparatively study the effects of SCMC and ACMC on Englishmajors’ oral performance through experiment, in order to explore a suitable practical wayto improve students’ oral English proficiency.Based on Krashen’s second language acquisition theory, Long’s interactionhypothesis, Swain’s output hypothesis and the constructivism learning theory, the authoremploys both the quantitative and qualitative research methods and addresses threeresearch questions related to QQ-based SCMC and email-based ACMC: What are theeffects of QQ-based SCMC and email-based ACMC on English majors’ oral performance?Is there a difference between the effects of QQ-based SCMC and email-based ACMC onEnglish majors’ general speaking proficiency and oral performance? What are thestudents’ and the teacher’s perceptions regarding these two patterns of communication?The research subjects are49freshmen majoring in English at Yanshan University.The author divides them into the SCMC group and ACMC group. The whole experimentlasts for ten weeks of oral English teaching. After analyzing the results of tests, oralEnglish performance, questionnaires and close interviews, the study reveals that: both theQQ-based SCMC and email-based ACMC have some effects on English majors’ oralperformance; there is a significant difference in the effects of SCMC and ACMC onEnglish majors’ general speaking proficiency, amount of output and lexical density, andthe SCMC exerts more positive effects, however, in other aspects, there is no significantdifference between these two groups; both the students’ and teacher’s perceptions arepositive about these two patterns, but they also point out some deficiencies. Although there are some limitations of this study, the results of it provide pedagogicalimplications: both the QQ-based SCMC and email-based ACMC are helpful in improvingstudents’ oral English proficiency, but the SCMC assisted teaching model has morefavorable effects on students’ oral English performance than the ACMC assisted one.